The Perils of Pure Democaracy

June 26, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

In yesterday’s post on the Brexit vote, I wondered aloud about the wisdom of using a referendum to decide on specific policies. A commenter characterized my views as “the quintessential liberal view – elitist, snobbish, dismissive of democracy.”

I had thought that my reservations about direct democracy were more on the conservative side, something along the lines of Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), much beloved among American conservatives. (“In the twentieth century, he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.” Wikipedia) Burke was elitist and snobbish, and he favored decisions by elected representatives, not the masses, even when a representative’s decision contradicted the views of those who elected him. As Burke says to a hypothetical constituent of such a representative,  “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

As for “elitist, snobbish, dismissive of democracy,” the phrase also describes another icon of American conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Hamilton and Madison also favored a republic, with laws made by representatives, rather than what Madison calls “pure democracy.” Federalist #10 emphasizes this idea, though more to thwart the tyranny of the majority than to provide a buffer against bad judgment. Madison has a point. Suppose that a majority of the members of a community, a university for example, want to prevent conservatives from giving talks on campus.

Pure democracy would give us stronger gun control (including an outright ban on assault weapons), much more government spending on infrastructure, higher taxes on the wealthy (especially on capital gains), Senate hearings and a vote on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

But would we really want public opinion to determine these matters? Would we want a referendum on whether we return to the gold standard? Nearly all economists say it’s a bad idea. But it sounds good. After all the gold standard is, well, the gold standard of economic policies. And if something is the gold standard, that means it’s the best in its category. It’s easy to imagine a majority of the people being convinced of its virtues.

Maybe the 2008 bank bailout is a better analogy to Brexit. The bailout was a controversial matter. Simply put, the government would be giving a ton of money to the people who tanked the economy. Still, most economists as well as the Wall Street elites, thought it was necessary. The quintessentially democratic, non-elitist way to decide the matter would have been a referendum.

In March of that year, a poll showed that 60% of Americans opposed a bailout.

Maybe a referendum wouldn’t have been such a great idea even though it may have seemed like on at the time.

A Good Idea at the Time

June 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

The pound was down 10% making anything imported to the UK more expensive. Global markets tumbled, including those in the UK. Some Leave supporters were ecstatic.

But some seemed to be having buyer’s remorse. Google searches for “What happens if we leave the EU?” and “What is the EU?” tripled. (WaPo) They seemed to be waking up the morning after wondering just what it was they had done the night before.

All I could think of was Steve McQueen’s famous line in “The Magnificent Seven.”  McQueen plays Vin, one of the seven gunslingers who come to the aid of Mexican peasants who are being constantly raided by a group of bandits led by Calvera. At one point, Calvera captures the seven. He cannot understand why they would sign on to help a bunch of Mexican peasants.

CALVERA: The thing I don’t understand is why a man like you took the job in the first place. . .  Tell me why. VIN: Fella I once knew in El Paso, one day he took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him the same question, why? He said it seemed to be a good idea at the time.*

The vote to leave appears to be one of those impulsive decisions, the ones that seem like a good idea at the time. Many Leave voters – at least the ones who got a few seconds of airtime on American radio – were thinking in terms of personal complaints, not national policy. They reminded me of the woman I rented a flat from in London a decade ago. “There’s no Brits in London any more,” she said. and she was not happy about it.  

Voting often has a strong emotional component. The advantage of representative democracy over direct democracy is that we give the job of turning sentiments into actual policy to our representatives. Presumably, they have to think through more of the implications.**

I suppose what a democracy needs is a mechanism that allows people to express their political emotions and have it appear that those emotions have become policy while at the same time leaving real policy to those who will craft it more slowly and soberly.

The Leave vote does not automatically change the UK’s position. As a Financial Times post explains, the vote is technically a non-binding advisory. It’s possible that parliament will decide to act against the advisory. In any case, the process of leaving will take two years, and perhaps during that period, UK voters may rethink the Brexit,*** even it seemed like a good idea at the time.

As Calvera says to Vin in that same scene, “Only a crazy man makes the same mistake twice.”

------------------------------------------

* The video clip is here . I didn’t embed it because the way McQueen delivers the line doesn’t capture the feeling I think is appropriate. He’s serious, almost somber. I would prefer him laugh it off and say in effect, “Yeah, I guess it was stupid, but what can you do?” I also think that “seemed like a good idea” sounds better than “seemed to be a good idea.”

** My knowledge of political thought is slender. But surely one or more of The Federalist Papers must have considered this problem – how to keep the passions of the majority from inflaming the process of running a government.

*** On “Planet Money,” the American hosts asked British economist Tim Harford, “Any chance for a do-over? Two out of three?” Said Harford, “I think it’s unlikely.”

Blame Canada Culture

June 23, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Culture as a concept has always fascinated me –all those different groups with their different ways of thinking and reacting. But I’ve also grown skeptical of culture as an explanation for things we don’t like – especially when the explanation invokes the general culture for a problem that is more specific.

Here, for example, is Ramesh Ponnuru writing earlier this month at Bloomberg

Trump’s success in the presidential race so far reflects a cultural rot: It would once have been impossible for someone like him to win the nomination. But it also deepens that rot. If we elevate a man we know to be cruel, impulsive, insecure, vain and dishonest to the most powerful position in our country, that choice helps to define our own character and shape our expectations for one another. It also means that our political debate will be dumber, nastier and more content-free.

Is our culture in fact rotten? Ponnuru offers no evidence that it’s any more rotten than it was in the past. Instead, he offers this circular logic.

• Why is Trump winning in the primaries? Because of cultural rot.
• How do you know there’s cultural rot? Because Trump is winning. 

The other problem is that Ponnuru is blaming the entire culture for the actions of the Trump voters and supporters. At least I think he is. In much of the article he talks about “conservatives” who support Trump. But when he says “if we elevate . ..” and “our own character,” he seems to be casting a wider net. By “we” Ponnuru might mean conservatives or Republicans, but he never mentions  “conservative culture” or “Republican culture,” so I get the sense he means American culture.

But cultures don’t vote; people do. So political scientists rarely talk about cultural rot. Instead, they ask who are these people who support Trump — what age, gender, race, region, economic position, policy views, etc. But if, like Ponnuru, you are a conservative* and a Republican, you probably don’t want to say that a lot of the people who have been voting for your side all these years are morally rotten. And you don’t want to blame your party for those voters’ rotten choices. Instead, you’re like the parent whose kid is arrested and who says, “He’s a good kid, he just got swept up by the wrong crowd.” So you take a “Blame Canada” strategy and say that all these Trump voters got swept up by the cultural rot that is at large in the US.

-------------------------------------

* Ponnuru focuses on another factor dear to conservatives – character. He cites JFK, Gingrich, and Bill Clinton for their infidelities. But supporting Trump is worse, he says, because “the public had no way of knowing about most of their vices before voting for them. (Nixon’s swearing on the Watergate tapes, while not the focus of public concern, was scandalous.)” Yes, that’s right. The worst character flaw Ponnuru can find in Nixon is his swearing.

Imagine There’s a $5 Discount. It’s Easy If You Try. . . .

June 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Reading Robert H. Frank’s new book Luck and Success, I came across this allusion to the famous Kahneman and Tversky finding about “framing.”

It is common . . . for someone to be willing to drive across town to save $10 on a $20 clock radio, but unwilling to do so to save $10 on a $1,000 television set.

Is it common? Do we really have data on crosstown driving to save $10? The research that I assume Frank is alluding to is a 1981 study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (pdf here). Here are the two scenarios that Kahneman and Tversky presented to their subjects.

A.  Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for $125 and a calculator for $15. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for $10 at the other branch of the store, located 20 minutes drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store? B. Imagine that you are about to purchase a calculator for $125 and a jacket for $15. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for $120 at the other branch of the store, located 20 minutes drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store?

The two are really the same: would you drive 20 minutes to save $5 on a calculator? But when the discount was on a $15 calculator, 68% of the subject said they would make the 20 minute trip. When the $5 savings applied to the $125 calculator, only 29% said they’d make the trip.

The study is famous even outside behavioral economics, and rightly so. It points up one of the many ways that we are not perfectly rational when we think about money. But whenever I read about this result, I wonder: how many of those people actually did drive to the other store? The answer of course is none. There was no actual store, no $125 calculator, no $15 jacket. The subjects were asked to “imagine.” They were thinking about an abstract calculator and an abstract 20-minute drive, not real ones.*

But if they really did want a jacket and a calculator, would 60 of the 90 people really have driven the 20 minutes to save $5 on a $15 calculator? One of the things we have long known in social research is that what people say they would do is not always what they actually will do. And even if these subjects were accurate about what they would do, their thinking might be including real-world factors beyond just the two in the Kahneman-Tversky abstract scenario (20 minutes, $5). Maybe they were thinking that they might be over by that other mall later in the week, or that if they didn’t buy the $15 calculator right now, they could always come back to this same store and get it.

It’s surprising that social scientists who cite this study take the “would do” response at face value, surprising because another well-known topic in behavioral economics is the discrepancy between what people say they will do and what they actually do. People say that they will start exercising regularly, or save more of their income, or start that diet on Monday. Then Monday comes, and everyone else at the table is having dessert, and well, you know how it is.

In the absence of data on behavior, I prefer to think that these results tell us not so much what people will do. They tell us what people think a rational person in that situation would do. What’s interesting then is that their ideas about abstract economic rationality are themselves not so rational.

---------------------------
* I had the same reaction to another Kahneman study, the one involving “Linda,” an imaginary bank teller. (My post about that one, nearly four years ago, is here ). What I said of the Linda problem might also apply to the jacket-and-calculator problem: “It’s like some clever riddle or a joke – something with little relevance outside its own small universe. You’re never going to be having a real drink in a real bar and see, walking in through the door, an Irishman, a rabbi, and a panda.”

The Full Ferguson

June 17, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

FBI director, James Comey, didn’t call it “the Ferguson effect.” Instead, the recent rise in homicide rates was a “viral video effect” – a more accurately descriptive term for the same idea: that murder rates increased because the police were withdrawing from proactive policing.

The full sequence goes something like this:  Police kill unarmed Black person. Video goes viral. Groups like Black Lives Matter organize protests. Politicians fail to defend the police. Police decrease their presence in high-crime areas. More people in those areas commit murder.

Baltimore is a good example, as Peter Moskos has strongly argued on his blog Cop in the Hood. But many cities, even some with all the Ferguson elements, have not seen large increases in homicide.* Other factors – gang conflict, drugs, and the availability of guns – make a big difference, and these vary among cities. Chicago is not New York. Las Vegas is not Houston. All homicide is local.

There’s something else about the viral-video theory. It assumes that the crime is a game of cops and robbers (or cops and murderers), where the only important players are the bad guys and the cops. If the cops ease up, the bad guys start pulling the trigger more often. Or as Director Comey put it,

“There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’”

This model of crime leaves out the other people in those high-crime neighborhoods. It sees them as spectators or bystanders or occasionally victims. But those people, the ones who are neither cops nor shooters, can play a crucial role in crime control. In some places, it is the residents of the neighborhood who can get the troublesome kids to move off the corner. But even when residents cannot exert any direct force on the bad guys, they can provide information or in other ways help the police. Or not.

This suggests a different kind of Ferguson effect. In the standard version, the community vents its anger at the cops, the cops then withdraw, and crime goes up. But the arrows of cause and effect can point in both directions.  Those viral videos of police killing unarmed Black people reduce the general level of trust. More important, those killings are often the unusually lethal tip of an iceberg of daily unpleasant interactions between police and civilians. That was certainly the case with the Ferguson police department with its massive use of traffic citations and other fines as a major source of revenue. Little wonder that a possibly justifiable shooting by a cop elicited a huge protest.

It’s not clear exactly how the Full Ferguson works. Criminologist Rich Rosenfeld (U of Missouri, St. Louis) speculates that where people don’t trust the police, they are more likely to settle scores themselves. (An NPR story featuring Rosenfeld’s ideas is here.) That may be true, but I wonder if it accounts for increases in killings between gang members or drug dealers. They weren’t going to call the cops anyway. Nor were people who have been drinking and get into an argument, and someone has a gun.

But maybe where that trust is absent, people don’t do what most of us would do when there’s trouble we cannot handle ourselves  –  dial 911. As in Director Comey’s version, the police are less a presence in those neighborhoods but not because they are afraid of being prosecuted for being too aggressive and not because they are being petulant about what some politician said, but because people there are not calling the cops.

---------------------------

* New York, the city where I live, had all of the Ferguson-effect elements. The police killed an unarmed man. The crime they were arresting him for was selling “loosies” – individual cigarettes, fifty cents each. One of the cops put him in a choke hold. A video went viral Even knee-jerk police supporters found it hard to justify.  When the prosecutor could not get a grand jury to indict the copy, there were protests. The mayor did not voice support for the cops. The cops in turn do not want to do anything to support the mayor. In addition, the courts had recently put limits on aggressive policing tactics like stop-and-frisk. The number of such stops fell dramatically. Yet the number of murders in New York did not rise, nor did rates of other crimes.

When Guns Do What Guns Are Designed to Do

June 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

An assault rifle is designed to kill – to kill a lot of people, and quickly. That’s why it was created. That’s its primary function. For soldiers in combat, it’s a very good thing to have. If it could not kill lots of people, nobody would want it.

Manufacturing assault rifles in pink and posting pictures of young girls holding them doesn’t alter that basic purpose. Neither does the statistic that nearly all civilians who own them use them for fun. What that statistic means is that we as a nation have decided through our legislators that the fun of those gun owners is more important than the lives of 50 people in Orlando or 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the military developed small bomb, something like a hand grenade but much more powerful. It easily blows up a building and kills anything within a 50-yard radius. Soldiers find them to be very effective in combat.

The companies that manufacture these bombs also sell them to the public. Lots of people buy these bombs. Bomb stores spring up next to gun stores. They have names like Bombs Away or It’s Da Bomb – all in good fun. And in fact, nearly all of the buyers use them for fun – tossing them into empty fields. People go to bombing ranges that have small buildings put up so that patrons can blow them sky high. Of course, there are accidents. Bomb owners sometimes blow up themselves. Or their own houses with their children inside. 

But occasionally, once a year or so, someone tosses a bomb into a crowd of people or into a real building. Many people are killed. Predictably, liberals say that maybe we ought not allow these bombs to be freely sold. Maybe we ought not let them be sold at all. But the bomb lobby claims that bombs are armaments and therefore are protected by the Constitution from being restricted in any way, and besides, people need the bombs for their own protection. Our legislators, a majority of them, agree. The occasional slaughter is no reason to prevent everyone from getting a bomb.

The bomb lobby and the media will invariably refer to each slaughter as a “tragedy” –  unfortunate but unavoidable. After all, the bomber got his bombs legally. And if he did get them illegally, it just shows that bomb laws don’t work.

Punishment Isn’t About Crime

June 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston


Robin Hanson has a list of statements (here) that summarize his contrarian view. These include, among many others

Charity isn’t about Helping Church isn’t about God Medicine isn’t about Health Consulting isn’t about Advice School isn’t about Learning

The furor over the sentence given to the Stanford swimmer-rapist Brock Turner shows that we should add one more to the list.

Punishment isn’t about crime.

Criminologists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the effect of punishment on crime. Does the death penalty reduce murder rates, and if so by how much? Or more generally, do harsher punishments reduce the crimes they apply to? Does rehabilitation work – or more specifically, which kinds of programs work best? Does taking criminals off the streets reduce overall amounts of crime?

These functions of punishment go under the names of general deterrence, specific deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. They raise researchable cause-effect questions.
Not so what is probably the most important function of punishment – justice. In crim textbooks (including mine) it goes under the heading of “retribution” or “just deserts.” But basically it’s vengeance. And unlike the other rationales, it is concerned with punishment’s effects not on the behavior criminals but on the feelings of good and righteous citizens. The idea of retribution is that we want punishment for bad guys because it makes us feel better to see them suffer. If the bad person does not suffer enough, the good people feel dissatisfied, even angry, and they call for harsher punishment.

Usually, they cloak this impulse under the more rational principles like deterrence, but let’s be real. Do any of the people insisting that Brock Turner be given a longer sentence think that if he is released after only a few months he will commit more rapes? Or that the short sentence will encourage other fratboys to commit rape, as though horny, drunken 20-year old will pause to think, “Hey, it’ll only be 6 months in the slammer. Now if it were a few years . . . .” ? 

Often, this deterrence idea marches under the banner of “sending a message.” A harsh sentence “sends the message” that this behavior will not be tolerated. The cliche slap-on-the-wrist sentence sends the opposite message. But if the intended targets of these messages, potential criminals, rarely receive the messages. That’s especially true for those whose crimes are unplanned and opportunistic. Instead, the people who respond to the message are the same people who wanted it sent. And they respond according to whether the message satisfies their desire for vengeance, or as they would call it, justice.

Some social scientists argue that this desire is part of human nature and that evolution has embedded it in our genes. Even babies, some experiments show, get upset when evildoing (usually by puppets) goes unpunished. But even if the desire is universal, the punishments that arise from it vary widely. In some countries, the six-month sentence would be within the normal range. That is, it would satisfy the desire for justice. In other places, anything less than death would be too lenient.

When vengeance as the basis for policy outweighs the more rational factors like deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, you get juggernauts like the war on drugs, which was mostly vengeance under a veneer of deterrence. In the initial response to the perceived drug problem, politicians enacted harsher sentences to send a message to drug users and dealers. When these new laws failed to bring the promised reduction in crime, lawmakers might have paused to rethink their assumptions. Instead, they fell all over themselves proposing even harsher sentences, locking up more people for longer periods of time.

Doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of insanity. But in the war on drugs, it functioned like an addiction – addiction to punishment. When a mild amount didn’t have the desired effect, lawmakers (with public approval) raised the dose. We then became habituated to that new level, we thought that only an even higher dose would bring relief. We were punishment junkies, spending more and more of our money on something that brought little relief, all the while raising our level of tolerance. We wound up with “normal” sentences that people in many other Western countries considered medieval.

In the swimmer-rapist case, the people outraged by the six-month sentence are not campaigning for generally harsher sentences for rape. They are, however, demanding the equivalent of a policy change – replacing the judge. But the motive is the same – justice (or vengeance). If we can’t punish the rapist, then let’s try to punish the judge and replace him with someone who gives out sentences that make us feel better. Of course, only the self-delusional will think that punishing the rapist or the judge will have any effect on fratboy date-rape.

One final note: I am not saying that those who want a longer sentence for Turner are wrong. I’m not saying they’re right. What I am saying is that whoever enters that argument on either side should be clear as to the bases of their position. They should also recognize that the issue is one of morals or values, so unlike questions of deterrence, it cannot be resolved with facts.

Ceci n’est pas the Active Voice

June 8, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

My brother volunteers as a reader of audiobooks. His latest assignment was a methods text –  Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th edition (Geoffrey Maruyama and Carey S. Ryan, Wiley, 2014).  In the last chapter, on p. 511, he read this:

The use of the first person and the active voice is now preferred over the third person and the passive voice. The past tense is used when reporting the past research of others and in describing your own procedures. The present tense is used to discuss results currently in front of the reader ...

Political Ideas, Political Tactics

June 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A comment on the previous post claimed that political correctness is “bullying people.” The comment ignored most of the content of the post, which was about the tactic of using the term political correctness as a strategy used by bullies divert attention away from their bullying. The comment also confuses two dimensions – ideas and tactics. It’s a common enough mistake. Even the Wikipedia entry doesn’t keep ideas distinct from tactics.

Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct), commonly abbreviated to PC, is a term which, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures which are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.

The first sentence refers to ideas, as did my previous post (“comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”). The second sentence describes a rhetorical strategy: when you want to vilify something (in this case political correctness) go to extremes. Find examples of the most extreme version of the ideas and the most extreme tactics of its supporters. Once the phrase has become a pejorative, anything that can be labeled as politically correct must automatically be wrong.

But most people use the term to refer not to tactics but to ideas or values (e.g., “New York values”). To say that replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 is politically correct, or supporting gay marriage, or hoping that the Washington Redskins pick a different name, or thinking that women, Blacks, and LGBT people ought not be excluded from syllabuses or TV shows and that Donald Trump shouldn’t call women bimbos – these and a host of other issues, all of them labeled as politically correct, have nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with ideas and principles.

Bullying is a tactic, not an idea, and it is used by supporters of all sorts of political ideas. Anti-abortion activists scream into the faces women going to abortion clinics. Some even firebomb the clinics and make death threats against practitioners. In fact nowadays, thanks to the Internet, people from all over the political spectrum make death threats and use other vile tactics that all fall under the category of bullying.

The “political correctness = bullying” conflation illustrates another aspect of muddied thinking – “motivated cognition”: our feelings about the ideas affect our perception of the tactics. It’s like the football fan’s perception of pass interference or holding or some other infraction – whether we see a player’s tactic as legal or illegal depends on which side we’re rooting for. The classic 1954 study “They Saw a Game” documents this kind of motivated cognition among students following a controversial Dartmouth-Princeton football game.

More recently, in 2012 Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a similar study – “They Saw a Protest” (pdf here). All subjects were shown the the same video of protesters and police. Some were told that the protest took place outside an abortion clinic and that the protesters were anti-abortion. Others subjects were told that the scene was a military recruiting center and that the demonstrators were protesting the Army’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (still in effect in when the study was done).

Subjects were told to imagine that they were on a jury and that the video was key evidence in a case where the protesters were suing the police. One of the basic questions was whether the police had violated the free-speech rights of the protesters. On the whole, there was little difference between those who were told that the protest was at an abortion clinic (49% said yes, the police had violated the protesters’ rights) and those who were told it was at a recruiting office (45%). That’s on the whole. Separating the subjects according to political views revealed sharp differences in perceptions.

The measure of the subjects’ political orientation was not the usual liberal-conservative dimension but instead a space marked off by two axes: One axis is the Hierarchical-Egalitarian. Egalitarians think we should strive for greater equality in society; Hierarchicals are OK with current inequalities of race, class, and gender. The other axis is Individual-Communitarian – basically about the role of government. Is the government interfering too much in our lives (Individual), or is it not doing enough to improve things (Communitarian)? Translated into more conventional political categories, the Hierarchical and Individual would be conservative, the Egalitarian and Communitarian would be liberal.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Hierarchicals (solid lines in each graph) were much more likely to say the police were at fault when the protest was against an abortion clinic than against a recruitment center.  As they saw it, the protest at the military recruitment center – that was dangerous so the police had to move in. But when the protesters were anti-abortion, how dare the police bust up a legitimate protest. For the Egalitarians (dash lines), those positions were reversed. Basically, if we agree with the protesters, we perceive the police as violating their rights. If we disagree with the protesters, the police are just lawfully doing their job.

Politics shaped perception on an even more factual question: had the protesters blocked people from entering the building? Again, when the protest was at the recruitment center, Egalitarians saw the  protesters as relatively benign, Hierarchicals saw them as a threat to pedestrians and others. When the protest was at the abortion clinic, those perceptions flipped.

But wait, there’s more, and it gets worse. Not only does our ideology influence what we see, but we fail to recognize that connection, assuming instead that we are merely calling them not just as we see them but as they objectively are. At the same time, says Kahan, we are quick to spot the motivated perception of people we disagree with. The result is that we think those we disagree with are not just wrong but that they are acting in bad faith, deliberately misperceiving a peaceful protest as a violent mob or vice-versa.

For Political Correctness

June 4, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Political correctness.  Donald Trump scoffs at the idea, but he loves the phrase.  It’s what he uses to avoid questions and dismiss his critics. This strategy is what Sykes and Matza, in their now-classic 1957 article on “techniques of neutralization,” called “Condemning the Condemners.” Sykes and Matza were describing the thinking that juvenile delinquents use to justify their lawbreaking. Condemning the condemners neutralizes the rules against crimes, for after all, if the authorities are imperfect – corrupt, venal, unfair, etc. – then the laws they are enforcing can be ignored.

The delinquent, in effect, has changed the subject of the conversation in the dialogue between his own deviant impulses and the reactions of others; and by attacking others, the wrongfulness of his own behavior is more easily repressed or lost to view.

 
Similarly, Trump. Are his ideas and policies racist or sexist; are they intolerant on religion? Ignore that question, because the real problem is the idea behind the question itself:

MEGYN KELLY:  You once told a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice” it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees.. . . How will you answer the charge . . . that you are part of the war on women? TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.

                                   
The strategy plays well among Trump’s supporters. When Trump said that the problem was political correctness, they interrupted with cheers and applause.

But there’s something to be said for political correctness. Part of that creed might be summed up as “Don’t be an asshole, don’t be a bully.” It’s the same impulse towards decency as the dictum that the role of the press should be to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” If you’re doing it the other way round – comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted – you’re probably being an asshole and a bully.

Political correctness sides with those who are most easily victimized and stigmatized, especially when the basis of that stigma is something that the afflicted have little power to change – race, gender, sexuality, disability, age, physical appearance (height, weight, beauty).

A Washington Post story (here) about a case of bullying highlights these aspects of political correctness. It was on the “Post Most” list that week – the most popular stories among Post readers– probably for the same reason that the NRA loves stories about people using guns to defend themselves against bad guys. In this case, political correctness could have saved a life.

Emilie Olsen was adopted from China at nine months. She grew up in southwest Ohio. In fifth grade she became the object of jeering for her clothes (“Chinese people don’t wear camo”). In sixth grade this expanded to include accusations about her sexuality (a fake Instagram account “Emilie Olsen is Gay”). In seventh grade she was showing signs that the harassment was having its intended effects – her grades dropped, she became depressed, she cut herself. In addition to the online bullying, her tormentors posted graffiti in school bathroom stalls:  “Go kill yourself Emilie.”

She had some friends and supporters. Their demand to the bullies to “stop messing” with Emilie turned into a brief fight. Her psychological condition grew worse, and less than two months later, she got her father’s gun and killed herself.*

Her parents have sued the school, which of course denies that bullying, if there even was bullying, had anything to do with her death. The parents may not be able to prove their case legally. Still, if the school had enforced some of those principles the Trump-minded** dismiss as political correctness, Emilie Olsen would probably still be alive.

----------------------------
*The case illustrates another tenet of liberal thought – that guns are dangerous. A gun in the house is much more likely to be involved in an accident, a domestic fight, or a suicide than in defense against outside predators.

** Butler County is heavily Republican.  In the Republican primary in March, Kasich won the county. But Trump did much better there, losing by only 2 percentage points, than he did in the state as a whole, where he lost by 11 percentage points.

Breaking the Rules of Writing

June 1, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ah, litotes: “a figure of speech which employs an understatement by using double negatives.”

 I recently came across this quote from John Kenneth Galbraith.*

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Orwell, in his famous essay on politics and language, decries the “not un-“ construction because it tries to make the banal sound profound. But it also sacrifices clarity. Saying what something is rather than what it is not makes it specific. Also, we grasp a positive more quickly than two negatives. (See here, here, here, or here.)

Galbraith uses “not without” because he wants to understate. Saying that yes wealth does have some advantages makes those who would deny that idea seem even more ridiculous. 

The negative construction in the punch line –  “has never proved widely persuasive” – uses the same strategy of understatement. He could have said, “but nobody really believes it,” but Galbraith’s phrasing – the “widely” is crucial to the wit of the line –  implies that there are actually some people foolish enough to believe the myth.** 

Who are these people? Identifying them is not important, which is why the passive voice (“the case. . .has often been made”) here works perfectly well.

In a sentence of 23 words, Galbraith uses two constructions that I usually try to avoid – the passive voice and the double negative – but here they work wonderfully. Apparently, the rules don’t apply when you are using irony, especially when you are using it to undermine the essential folly of “the conventional wisdom” (a term coined by Galbraith, by the way). In this case, that bit of conventional wisdom is the idea that money can’t buy what’s important in life – happiness, for example, or elections.

-----------------

* Howard Wainer uses a slightly different version in his recent book Truth and Truthiness.

** A famous Sophie Tucker quote expresses the same idea; “I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is better.” As with the Galbraith quote, its wit depends on some people having tried to make the case to the contrary. 

Poverty and Dentistry

May 31, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A couple of years ago, Marco Rubio (remember him?), the Heritage foundation, and others were making the ludicrous claim that if poor people would just get married, the rate of child poverty would fall by 80% or more. After all, a very large proportion of children in poverty lived in single-parent homes. These conservatives were mistaking correlation for cause, and the causal arrow might easily point the other way. When most of the men in sight are poor and without prospects for improving their lot, a woman with children might well choose to remain unwed. So instead of non-marriage leading to children in poverty, it is the general poverty of a population that makes for lower rates of marriage. 

To illustrate the folly of taking correlation as cause, I used the example of dentistry. People who go to the dentist are much less likely to be poor, and the poor were twice as likely to be toothless. By the logic of marriage-ends-poverty, we could conclude that visiting the dentist once a year would lower a person’s probability of being poor by 50%. (That blog post is here. )

I was being facetious about cause and effect. But it turns out that while dentistry may not cause prosperity, poor people think it’s important. Richard Reeves at The Brookings Institute (here) looks at reports on Colorado, a state where expansion of healthcare under Obamacare and Medicaid included dental coverage for those with incomes under $30,000.

Did low-income people take advantage of their new medical and dental benefits? No and yes, respectively. The Colorado Health Access Survey found that from 2009 to 2015, the rate of low-income Coloradans visiting the doctor changed only slightly. But visits to the dentist were another matter.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

As the percent of low-income people with dental coverage rose to about 63%, the percent who actually visited the dentist rose to nearly that same proportion.

Reeves offers no explanation for why the poor were so much more likely to use their dental coverage than their medical. Perhaps it’s because the pain of a toothache is hard to ignore. Also, with many medical symptoms, a visit to the doctor is only the beginning, and the symptom improves gradually, with medications, treatments, and other regimens, But the pain of a toothache can be ended with a single visit to the dentist.

The Face That Launched a Thousand False Positives

May 27, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

What bothered the woman sitting next to him wasn’t just that the guy was writing in what might have been Arabic (it turned out to be math). But he also looked like a terrorist. (WaPo story here.)

We know what terrorists look like. And now an Israeli company, Faception, has combined big data with facial recognition software to come up with this.

According to their Website:

Faception can analyze faces from video streams, cameras, or . . . databases. We match an individual with various personality traits or types such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist.

My first thought was, “Oh my god, Lombroso.”

If you’ve taken Crim 101, you might remember that Lombroso, often called “the father of criminology,” had the idea that criminals were atavisms, throwbacks to earlier stages of human evolution, with different skull shapes and facial features. A careful examination of a person’s head and face could diagnose criminality – even the specific type of lawbreaking the criminal favored. Here is an illustration from an 1876 edition of his book. Can you spot the poisoner, the Neapolitan thief, the Piedmont forger?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Criminology textbooks still mention Lombroso, though rarely as a source enlightenment. For example, one book concludes the section on Lombroso, “At this point, you may be asking: If Lombroso, with his ideas about criminal ears and jaws, is the ‘father of criminology,’ what can we expect of subsequent generations of criminologists?”

Apparently there’s just something irresistible in the idea that people’s looks reveal their character. Some people really do look like criminals, and some people look like cops.* Some look like a terrorist or a soccer mom or a priest. That’s why Hollywood still pays casting directors. After all, we know that faces show emotion, and most of us know at a glance whether the person we’re looking at is feeling happy, angry, puzzled, hurt, etc. So it’s only logical that a face will reveal more permanent characteristics. As Faception puts it, “According to social and life science research, our personality is determined by our DNA reflected in our face.” It’s not quite true, but it sounds plausible.

The problem with this technique is not the theory or science behind it, and probably not even its ability to pick out terrorists, brand promoters, bingo players, or any of their other dramatis personae in the Faception cast of characters. The problem is false positives. Even when a test is highly accurate, if the thing it’s testing for is rare, a positive identification is likely to be wrong. Mammograms, for example, have an accuracy rate as high as 90%. Each year, about 37 million women in the US are given mammograms. The number who have breast cancer is about 180,000. The 10% error rate means that of the 37 million women tested, 3.7 million will get results that are false positives. It also means that for the woman who does test positive, the likelihood that the diagnosis is wrong is 95%.**

Think of these screening tests as stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong; without some grain of truth, they wouldn’t exist. The problem is that they have many grains of untruth – false positives. We have been taught to be wary of stereotypes not just because they denigrate an entire class of people but because in making decisions about individuals, those stereotypes yield a lot of false positives.  

Faception does provide some data on the accuracy of its screening. But poker champions and terrorists are rarer even than breast cancer. So even if the test can pick out the true terrorist waiting to board the plane, it’s also going to pick out a lot of bearded Italian economists jotting integral signs and Greek letters on their notepads.

(h/t Cathy O’Neil at MathBabe.org)
----------------------

* Some people look like cops. My favorite example is the opening of Richard Price’s novel Lush Life – four undercover cops, though the cover they are under is not especially effective.

The Quality of Life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime; their motto: Everyone’s got something to lose.  [...] At the corner of Houston and Chrystie, a cherry-red Denali pulls up alongside them, three overdressed women in the backseat, the driver alone up front and wearing sunglasses. The passenger-side window glides down . “Officers, where the Howard Johnson hotel at around here ...” “Straight ahead three blocks on the far corner,” Lugo offers. “Thank you.” [. . .] The window glides back up and he shoots east on Houston. “Did he call us officers?” “It’s that stupid flattop of yours.” “It’s that fuckin’ tractor hat of yours.”

It wasn’t the haircut or the hat. They just looked like cops.

** The probability that the diagnosis is correct is 5% – the 180,000 true positives divided by the 3.7 million false positives plus the 180,000 true positives – roughly 180,000 / 3,900,000. (I took this example from Howard Wainer’s recent book, Truth and Truthiness.)

A Time for Cliches

May 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

You can imagine what the reaction on the right would be if students heckled their graduation speaker with shouts of “Trash” and “Get off the stage.” Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You can find what  the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and similar conservative havens have already said – that campus liberals are against free speech and that they are afraid to even hear ideas they disagree with.

Will they say those same things about the students at Cal State Fullerton who erupted during a graduation ceremony at the College of Communications. The speaker was Maria Elena Salinas, an anchor at Univision, At one point, she spoke briefly in Spanish “to encourage students interested in going into Spanish-language media and to tell them she has a scholarship for them,” (WaPo) The Fullerton student body is 40% Hispanic.

Tensions worsened as Salinas began offering advice to journalism students to use the tools of media to rebut political figures such as Donald Trump. That’s when folks began yelling things to Salinas such as, “Get off the stage!” and “Trash!” (OC Weekly )

Were these students* against free speech? Were they afraid to hear her ideas about Trump? I doubt it. I can only repeat what I said a year ago at graduation time (here): graduations are not about the exchange of ideas, they are about symbolism, and what the ritual, almost any ritual, symbolizes is group solidarity. Conflict is out place. If a speaker represents policies that are highly divisive, or if the speech becomes explicitly partisan, or if the speaker excludes part of the assembled group (e.g., by speaking a language half the group cannot understand), the temporary unity is ruined. The students who heckled Salinas probably felt that she had a right to her opinions and her language, but this was their graduation ceremony, and she was spoiling the show.

I guess there’s something to be said for tepid speeches with their cliches about hard work and achievement, about the future and seizing opportunity, about following your passion and making a difference and all those other phrases on your Commencement Speech Bingo card.

-----------------------
* The students who voiced their displeasure must have been a small minority and seated away from the microphone. In the video in the WaPo link, their heckling cannot be heard. If you watch the video excerpt, you can also hear that the Spanish portion of the speech took less than thirty seconds. So possibly the Post is making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted.

Is It Trivia?

May 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

 Is knowledge important? Or in the age of the Internet, is it all just trivia?

1. A quiz posted on Facebook says “97% of Adults Can’t Pass This Elementary Test (21 Questions).” What is the closest planet to the sun is, where was Einstein was born, which president served three consecutive terms. . . .

I could answer most of the questions. But instead of basking in the glow of the screen’s telling me I was a genius, or being horrified that so many of my fellow Americans flunked, I was bothered by the more important question: so what? What’s the point of knowing facts like these? Unless you’re going to be on Jeopardy, does it matter any more? Most of the 97% do not need to know which planet is closest to the sun, and if they did ever need that information, they could find it on the Internet.

And yet, I probably use someone’s knowledge of stuff like this as a proxy for their ability to think.

2.  Most multiple-choice exams are based on this same assumption – that students who can remember more facts are better students. Years ago I was discussing this with an economics adjunct who had an office near mine.  “Why not use multiple-choice tests for grading?” I said. “If you used some other kind of test, you’d get the same results.”

    “Then why not just ask them their parents’ income?” he said. “You’d get the same distribution.”

3. I told one of my classes that they could choose the kind of final they wanted: open book – meaning books, notes, phones, whatever – or traditional. With open book, I warned, the questions will be harder– not just giving a definition or fact. Even the multiple-choice items will require you to think. I gave them this free sample:

A Mastercard ad shows a father and son at a baseball game.  The voiceover says, “Two tickets $46. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas $27. One autographed baseball $50.  Real conversation with eleven-year-old son, priceless.”  The idea that conversation with your own son is “priceless” – that its value cannot be put into dollars – means that its value is     a.    worthless     b.    utilitarian     c.    universalistic     d.    particularistic

Besides, I said, looking up stuff on the Internet or in your books, notes, or downloaded PowerPoints takes time, time that you’ll need for writing.

“So now, how many want open book?” I asked. Hands flew up. It wasn’t even close.

4. Question #10 on the Facebook quiz:

More trivia, important, if at all, only because the US is still stuck with its pre-metric system.

The day after I took this test, I was in the locker room at the gym. One guy there had an empty three-liter Poland Spring jug, He must have been about to use it to mix up some energy elixir. He was asking his friend how many ounces in a gallon, wondering, I guess, if the jug would be large enough. The directions for the magic powder he’d bought probably told him to mix so many scoops with one gallon of water. 

The label said three liters or 101.4 ounces.  The friend was pretty sure that a gallon was 162 ounces. Oh, well. When it’s time to mix the cocktail, they can look it up on their smart phones. And if they don’t, the guy with the jug didn’t look like someone whose buffness would suffer much from a potion that, like his general knowledge, was too diluted.

Auctions – Making a Killing

May 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Anything can happen at an auction, especially when the item is unique. The baseball that was hit for a record-setting home run is indistinguishable from the baseball you can buy for $25 or less at Wal*Mart. But it’s worth more because of its close association with an important event or person.

How much more? If there has been a market for that kind of item, we can make a fairly good guess. Maybe we know what other home-run balls have gone for the same way we know the auction histories of Rothkos, Chippendales, and other collector’s items.

But what if the object is truly unique? What if the event, unlike record setting home runs, happened only once and will never happen again. And to add to the uncertainty, what if the bidders are similarly unknown – people who have never entered an auction?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Yes, George Zimmerman is auctioning the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin. I’m curious to see what happens. As far as I know, there’s no established or even occasional market for guns used in celebrated killings.

Some objects acquire their value because of they carry the magical power of the person they belonged to. A celebrity’s signature, a rock star’s sweaty t-shirt tossed to the audience. But I suspect that the bidders want this gun not because it was touched by Zimmerman. Even gunslingers, I would guess, don’t see him as a charismatic figure. Instead, the value lies in the sacred event. It’s like buying a piece of the Berlin Wall. The event in this case is the killing of Trayvon Martin and all its symbolic meaning. Even Zimmerman makes that point in the description of the item.

(Click to enlarge. Or see the text, in a readable font size, at the bottom of the page.)

Zimmerman also stresses the gun’s symbolic political meaning. He says that “a portion” of the money will go for political purposes.

How much is it worth to own the crucial artifact of that killing? We’ll know by tomorrow.

You can bid on the gun here. Bidding starts at $5000.

Text of the auction description

Prospective bidders, I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon. The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012. The gun is a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm. It has recently been returned to me by the Department of Justice. The pistol currently has the case number written on it in silver permanent marker. Many have expressed interest in owning and displaying the firearm including The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. This is a piece of American History. It has been featured in several publications and in current University text books. Offers to purchase the Firearm have been received; however, the offers were to use the gun in a fashion I did not feel comfortable with. The firearm is fully functional as the attempts by the Department of Justice on behalf of B. Hussein Obama to render the firearm inoperable were thwarted by my phenomenal Defense Attorney. I recognize the purchaser's ownership and right to do with the firearm as they wish. The purchaser is guaranteed validity and authenticity of the firearm. On this day, 5/11/2016 exactly one year after the shooting attempt to end my life by BLM sympathizer Matthew Apperson I am proud to announce that a portion of the proceeds will be used to: fight BLM violence against Law Enforcement officers, ensure the demise of Angela Correy's persecution career and Hillary Clinton's anti-firearm rhetoric. Now is your opportunity to own a piece of American History. Good Luck. Your friend, George M. Zimmerman ~Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum~

UPDATE: As you know if you clicked on the link, the 9 mm piece of history has been removed from the auction site. Neither GunBroker.com nor Zimmerman has offered an explanation.

Sometimes I Feel Like . . . a Muddledness Child

May 1, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Molly Worthen* is fighting tyranny, specifically the “tyranny of feelings” and the muddle it creates.  It’s a tyranny without a tyrant (sorry, Obama haters; you can’t pin this one on him). Instead, it’s like the Yeerks in the Animorphs books my son used to read – worm-like aliens that slip in through a human’s ear, wrap themselves around his brain, and take over his thought. We don’t realize that our thinking has been enslaved by this tyranny, but alas, we now speak its language. Case in point:

“Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale student explained to a reporter in Florida.

Why the “linguistic hedging” as Worthen calls it? Why couldn’t the kid just say, “Sanders is too idealistic”? You might think the difference is minor, or perhaps the speaker is reluctant to assert an opinion as though it were fact. Worthen disagrees..

“I feel like” is not a harmless tic. . . . The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

The phrase “I feel like” is part of a more general evolution in American culture. We think less in terms of morality – society’s standards of right and wrong – and more in terms individual psychological well-being. (I almost always dislike the phrase “in terms of,” but in this case, it is apt. I am talking about words.) The shift from “I think” to “I feel like” echoes an earlier linguistic trend  when we gave up terms like “should” or “ought to” in favor of “needs to.” To say, “Kayden, you should be quiet and settle down,” invokes external social rules of morality. But, “Kayden, you need to settle down,” refers to his internal, psychological needs. Be quiet not because it’s good for others but because it’s good for you.

In an earlier post (here) I reported that “needs to” began its rise in the late 1970s. “I feel like” is more recent, says Worthen, going back only a decade or two.

[Update: After I originally posted this, Philip Cohen ran “I feel like” through Google nGrams, as did Mark Liberman at Language Log, and found that, like “needs to,” the phrase “I feel like” began its rise in the late 1970s,not in the 90s as Worthen seems to think. Here is my own nGrams version. To ensure that “I feel like” excludes phrases like “I feel like taking a walk ” or “I feel like a motherless child,” I added a pronoun so that “I feel like” has to be followed by a clause, e.g., “I feel like he is too idealistic.” To get both lines on the same grid, I had to multiply “I feel like” uses by 500.]

Regardless of when the tide of “I feel like” starts its rise, Worthen finds it more insidious. She says that the phrase defeats rational discussion. You can argue with what someone says about the facts. You can’t argue with what they say about how they feel.

Worthen is asserting a clear cause and effect. She quotes Orwell: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” She has no evidence of this causal relationship, but she cites some linguists who agree. She also quotes Mark Liberman, who does not agree and is much calmer about the whole thing. When you say, “I feel like. . .” people know what you mean despite the hedging, just as they know that when you say, “I feel,” it means “I think,” and that you are not speaking about your actual emotions.

The more common “I feel like” becomes, the less importance we may attach to its literal meaning. “I feel like the emotions have long since been mostly bleached out of ‘feel that,’ ”

Worthen nevertheless insists on the Yeerkish insidious quality of “I feel like.”  “When new verbal vices become old habits, their power to shape our thought does not diminish.” She does not provide any evidence to show that “I feel like” has actually shaped our thoughts or that it has a shadowy power to cloud men’s minds.

“Vices” indeed. Her entire op-ed piece is a good example of the style of moral discourse that she says we have lost. Her stylistic preferences may have something to do with her scholarly ones – she studies conservative Christianity. No “needs to” for her. She closes her sermon with shoulds:

We should not “feel like.” We should argue rationally, feel deeply and take full responsibility for our interaction with the world.

-------------------------
*Worthen’s op-ed in today’s New York Times is here.

Happy Birthday, Duke

April 29, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Edward Kennedy Ellington, born April 29, 1899.  His work – its quality, quantity, and diversity – is one of the treasures of American music. And he wrote most of it while working full-time as CEO of a touring band. Here is a 1940 recording of “Cottontail” – “modern jazz before there was ever such a term,” according to David Rickert (here)

One early morning years ago, I was driving to work, feeling not especially cheerful about, well, everything. The radio was on – WBGO – and the DJ played this recording, and suddenly the fog lifted. I especially like the saxophone section chorus that starts shortly after the 2:00 mark.

There’s also Ben Webster’s famous solo on the second chorus – “one of Webster's best solos, and also one of the greatest ever recorded,” says Rickert ,adding that it’s a great example of a solo telling a story. But for the full story, listen to the lyric by Jon Hendricks –  Beatrix Potter meets Duke Ellington. It begins,

Way back in my childhood
I heard a story so true
’Bout a funny bunny
Stealing some boo from a garden he knew.

(Hendricks wrote it in around 1960 – it’s on LHR’s 1962 album (listen here). But “boo” is a 1940s term for what we now call weed. )

How the Other 47% Lives

April 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember the 47% – those Americans whose income was so low that they were not required to pay any income tax? Mitt Romney talked about them four years ago when he was running for president. They are generally a concern among conservatives, who have identified them variously as “dependent,” “irresponsible,” “takers,” “lucky duckies,” and probably other unflattering names. 

That number, 47%,  cropped up again about a year ago when the Federal Reserve issued the results of a survey on household economic well-being (here). The Fed asked people what they would do if faced with an unexpected emergency costing $400. Only 53% of Americans said that they had enough cash hand or that they could pay it off on their next month’s credit card bill. The other 47% would have to sell something or go into debt. And some said that they would just be unable to find the money.

The Fed’s question is hardly hypothetical. Nearly a quarter of the households reported at least one financial hardship in the past year. Medical and job setbacks accounted for over half of these.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The Fed survey found that even among people earning $40,000 - $100,000, only slightly more than half (56%) could deal with a $400 crisis with either cash on hand or one-month credit card debt. Those with lower incomes, especially Blacks and Hispanics, fare even worse. Only 23% and 31% respectively could handle a $400 setback.

It’s possible that Obamacare will reduce the financial burden of medical emergencies. The survey was done in 2014 before the full effects of Obamacare were felt. Still, even among those with insurance and incomes in the middle category reported foregoing some medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it.

There’s a quote I’ve come across a few times in discussions about these kinds of uncertainties. “I’m just one illness, or one job, or one divorce away from poverty.” I’m not sure who said it – probably many people. The point is that it’s not only the poor whose economic position is precarious.  Middle-class people may just be less likely to admit it. Financial worry and need can be matters of shame, especially for those who seem to be solidly middle class. It’s not something anyone wants to talk about frankly.

Neal Gabler comes out of the financial-fear closet in a recent article in The Atlantic. I remember seeing Gabler on TV in the 1980s as half of the team that replaced Siskel and Ebert chatting about new movies on PBS. I figured he was doing all right. But no. He has not been living extravagantly, but with an income at about the US median, he too has to struggle.

I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

Gabler has social capital (friends, family), and perhaps cultural capital, that he can, in an emergency, convert to financial capital. Most of the others in the 47% are not so lucky.

 UPDATE, April26:  Scott Winship has a critique of Gabler’s article and of the Fed data.  His article is online at National Review (here). Winship is the Walter B. Wriston fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank (Walter Wriston was the CEO of Citicorp from 1967 to 1984), and he scoffs at the notion that nearly half of us would be hard pressed to deal with a $400 setback. He parses the language of the Fed’s questionnaire (saying how you would cover the $400 is not the same as saying whether you could cover it). And besides, lots of people don’t save that $400 because of the multitude of people and institutions they have at their back:

“various forms of private insurance, a more general insurance system is constituted by 401(k) loans and distributions, home equity, credit cards, the public safety net and social insurance, bankruptcy courts, legally mandated emergency-room care, marriage, family, and friends.”

No right-wing critique of the economic hardship (and according to Winship the hardship isn’t really that hard or widespread) would be complete without reference to individual virtue, and Winship comes through for the team:

“If too few people have $400 in emergency funds, it might mean that the economy is doing poorly by them. But it might also mean that too few of us have internalized the virtue of thrift.”

He also hints that in his heart of hearts he believes that the impact of the economy on individuals is less important than the impact of individual virtue on the economy.

“We should want to both promote responsible choices and have an effective economy; we cannot simply presume that more economic growth would promote thrift. The reverse could very well be true.”

Reality Trumping Satire

April 23, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s hard to do political satire when reality keeps catching up with you. I don’t know who first made this observation – Mort Sahl, maybe. Tom Lehrer said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the issue of the The New Yorker that came out earlier this week, all the cartoons were about Donald Trump. Roz Chast imagined the Trump campaign saying that the Trump we’ve been seeing for the last months or perhaps years was just an act.

Two days ago, Trump’s campaign manager announced that the Trump’s performance as a candidate was just what the Chast said – all a big put-on.

Speaking at a private meeting of Republican Party leaders, Paul Manafort, who was recently hired as Trump’s campaign chief, acknowledged the billionaire businessman has been  “projecting an image” in order to energize voters in the primary election campaign.  “When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose,” Manafort said. [source]

Then it gets really meta. Roz Chast’s cartoon on page 49 anticipated the reality. Later in the magazine, on page 88 Robert Leighton’s cartoon anticipates the anticipation.

Of course, the best example of the reality-overtaking-satire problem remains the Onion headline a day or two before the 2001 inauguration of George W. Bush.